There used to be this game magazine – not like PC Gamer, more a literary magazine – this online-only ‘essays about video games’ title. I forget the name of it, but it was around in the early 2010s. Their submission page had two instructions. First, no essays about BioShock. Second, no essays about how some game got you through a difficult time in your life. Immediately hilarious – in the same category as ‘Do not attempt to stop chainsaw with hands or genitals.’ You know exactly what’s gone on behind the scenes. BioShock was one of the first really big mainstream artsy games, one of the early ones to grapple so centrally with politics and philosophy. It was a mature world with thoughtful, careful themes and ideas. For a lot of people, it opened up the scope of what games could be. Whomst among us has not written an essay about BioShock?

The second instruction is funny too, although – you know, it’s obviously a bit more serious. In the 2010s there was a real increase in memorial practices relating to video games. When friends or family members died, people increasingly remembered the games they played together. There’s plenty of stories out there. There’s a bunch about playing Halo multiplayer with dads or brothers or friends who passed away, some in tragic circumstances. It all happens at the same time as in-game memorials to fans or celebrities started becoming more common. There’s Michael Mamaril, a Borderlands fan, who passed away in 2011 and was commemorated in-game with a character in Borderlands 2. There’s actually also a eulogy for Mamaril done up by the voice actor for Claptrap: “I come bearing the most grievous of news. The first soldier down.” You’ve also got the Robin Williams memorial in WoW in 2014, after his death, and in 2017 Michael Forgey’s character in Middle Earth: Shadow of War, which had the DLC controversy – throughout this period, there’s just a lot more of this type of relationship to video games. We remember players in games, we remember the games we played with them – as games mature, they become a place for sad memories as well as happy ones. They develop complex histories.

The problem is (and I say this with love) a bunch of these types of stories are really boring to read. An experience can be profound or important to the individual without being interesting to a broader audience. I made this point when we were talking about The Gardens Between: it’s possible to feel something very deeply but not really convey it with any particular craft. The games in these stories are often incidental, interchangeable. Some guy played Halo with his dad, and now he thinks of his dad whenever he sees Master Chief. Halo, in that story, is incidental. It could be any game. It could be Half-Life or Hitman. The anecdote doesn’t bring us to a deeper understanding of the text. It’s interesting as an anthropological study, as a study of the role of games in human culture, but it’s not really a study of the specific game itself. If you’re a game magazine trying to explore the themes and concepts of different games, and you’re getting blasted by hundreds of versions of ‘this title reminds me of my dad’ – you’d pull your hair out.

Anyway, I was thinking about that magazine this week. I’ve had a very stressful time, and so I’ve been playing Sekiro. It’s a good one for when I’m stressed. You have to focus; there’s a rhythm and flow that you can really slip into – I’ve always wanted to write an essay about Sekiro, but I’ve never had anything to say, and it struck me as funny that the only thing I did have to say about it would have made some magazine editor in the 2010s scream and run out of the room. I do think there’s something positive about that autobiographical impulse, though. The output is not necessarily all that good, but we should recognise the underlying critical impetus, which remains intact. It’s good to talk about games in terms of what they mean to you. That’s a valid foundation for your argument. You bring yourself to the game. You bring your history, your culture, your experiences – and they go on to shape your encounter with the game. It’s good and valuable and interesting to reflect on where games fit into our lives. They are not played from a neutral, idealised perspective. They are played by people – by real, fleshy people – when we’re stressed, busy, sad, tired, horny, late for work. There’s this devastating Kotaku article that came out around the time of the 2016 DOOM – the link is to a repost, and I can’t find the name of the original author – but it’s about this guy trying to beat the game on Ultra-Nightmare and really just neglecting his kids. It’s such a poignant reminder that games are played in the real world. They touch our real lives, and our lives in turn bleed over into the stories. That’s a source of strength for our criticism. The problem with variations on ‘Sekiro helped me through a tough week at work’ isn’t that that’s an invalid approach to the text. The problem is that it’s not deep enough. There’s more to say. In Dark Souls, persistence in the face of difficulty is portrayed as part of what makes us human. You don’t lose when you fail; you lose when you give up. That’s a theme of the game, it’s part of the mechanics – it’s a concept performed by the player, almost ritualistically, through the act of gameplay. It’s a spiritual act of cleansing and affirmation. You play, you die, you try again. You only really lose if you stop trying. That’s a concept that we might take out into our broader lives, into the working week, but it’s also tied to the structure of the game. It tells us something about how the game is designed, and what it’s trying to say. You want to write about playing Halo with your dad? Write an essay about the theme of community. Tell us what Halo has to say about that concept. Bring us deeper into the game, and deeper in turn into the things that are important in your life.